In Android 5.0, the default keyboard looks substantially different from how it has looked largely since the days of Ice Cream Sandwich. The new out-of-the-box method of typing comes with a flatter theme that supplies a stark new feel. At the end of the day, though, it's still used primary to punch in letters onto the screen, and there's nothing particularly exciting to share there. One change we would like to highlight though is the addition of new emoji.

Google hasn't completely redone the full collection of smiley faces and other icons, but it has taken this time to alter some of its previous work. While most of the emoji were already yellow, certain icons depicting a baby, boy, girl, couple, and various other people utilized a pale skin tone. Rather than going down the more difficult and inefficient road of producing enough icons to account for racial diversity, Google has tweaked them to make the images look less human and more like the yellow, abstract representations of people we've come to expect from emoji.

New.

Old.

Some emoji don't appear to be colored in yet, such as the biceps, eyeballs, ears, and nose in the second screenshot above, all body parts that were shaded with a light skin tone in the previous version of the keyboard. There's a chance Google will flesh these out, in a way, before the keyboard rolls out to the broader userbase. Or this may just be how it has decided to alter those images going forward, as the older keyboard already includes a few similar white and pink emoji.

From a consistency standpoint, it just makes sense to keep emoji yellow when the first few pages are already in that tone. And personally, since the olden days of desktop instant messengers, I've been more than willing to accept a world where all people are yellow and other colors are reserved for everything else.

Standards are good in emoji because some can't translate very well(As in, they don't even look like they express the same). I personally think the google emoji look alien and fat. Not cute at all. I much rather use the iOS icons.

gonsa sba

Indeed, that's why I created the mod of Emoji Switcher. We can choose which emoji stays in the system. iOS, Android or many others (samsung, lg..)
And personally, I also like more the iOS/Whatsapp ones.
As related to this article, this is just a font changing in the system/fonts folder, and has nothing to do with the keyboard (at least that's what it was before)
I will do some research on this matter.

Most people dont see any reason to pay for something, when there's perfectly good free solutions available?

Adam

well.. SwiftKey is free. if you don't want to pay for extra skins that's fine. you can use defaut skins

Stripes

I used SwiftKey for some time (still have it installed) but it's to damn slow and laggy comparing to the default.
Loved and miss the option to have 2 or more language autocorect / dictionaries at the same time though.

HellG

I have had Swiftkey for so long and It was good on my previous devices specially my note 2 fast forward to my Note 3 however and the performance of the keyboard is absolute shit and people have been complaining on their forum for so long and no fix yet.

They have simply pulled a Dolphin browser/Touchwiz out of this one, fill the app with so many useless features and forget optimizations.

Those weren't emoji, that was before Android has any support for emoji. They weren't in the keyboard either, the keyboard only had smilies and the messaging app replaced them with the bugdroid icons in the message history. But yeah, they were great!

Source: My old Nexus 1

mark boyle

Google removed the prayer'm

mark boyle

Google removed the prayer hands emoji. I'm waiting for an explanation. They have star of David, devil. Why remove the prayer emoji?

Brad

god i hope this is a joke

Stripes

I see what you did there. :-)

ParthG

I was looking for this the other day for a joke.. but I couldn't find it :o

bro

Really? That's weird. Hopefully they have the full set when it officially comes out.

🙏

Victor Souza

it was never prayer hands
it's a highfive

pfmiller

SMH. It's just not in the screenshot, that doesn't mean they removed it.

mark boyle

Smh? So much hate from me? Check the keyboard, find it, show it to me.

Eric Hoch

Santa is still sad...

wickets

can this be downloaded on kitkat devices? thanks

Victor Souza

how do I enable the emoji key on phones? It works OTB on my tablet but I never got it to work on my phone

meezy

Google keyboard?? Long press enter depending on the app 👍

Victor Souza

yeah, GKeyboard, but on tablets there's a special key for that, just pressing it goes to the smileys page, on my phone it opens a popup, then you press the smileys icon

Peter Waegemans

Now what they SHOULD be doing, is getting these emojies (or emoji's) to show up in a decent manner in the gmail chat window instead of displaying brackets.

Guest

Well..

Simon Belmont

It does lag when loading the emoji resources. But, it's not nearly as bad as was before they started putting less on a page, though.

Of course the downside to that is that you have to scroll, scroll, scroll a lot more. I wish they'd work lag versus scrolling kink out.

What they NEED to do is provide a thumb / detachable thumb layout for Google keyboard on tablets. But no, prolly crapple patent. I'm going to blame anything missing in other platforms on crapple patents.

I just hope they remove the cat faces. I'm fed up of :3 being translated into a cat.

kamilly

como chama esse aplicativo ?

Havelyn

So I got the update, but I can't for the life of me figure out where to GET the emojis, since it is not in it's usual place. Please help?

Faslane

Is there a way to remove or hide the emoji key? I always hitnit on accident on google keyboard Fir android and have to delete them I'd prefer to not have it al all but love Tue google keyboard too. Any ideas? Thanks all.

John Anthony Loeppky

God, do I hate minimalism. They look too flat. Any way to get the old ones back?